The Secret Life of Unicorns

Unicorns are lovely. I mean really lovely. Not the sort of lovely that merely equates to a well-rendered toasted sandwich, or a walk on a crisp winter's morning along an adequately maintained bridleway to a fairly interesting National Trust stately home with someone you sometimes play squash with accompanied by their tolerable children and some slightly chilled cans of supermarket brand stout – I mean really really lovely.

What could be nicer than a unicorn? The classic portrait of the unicorn is of that majestic, mythical creature resplendent in rolling green hills (probably somewhere in Shropshire), next to a rainbow, just far enough away for awe-struck kiddies to see, but not approach, before it canters off to have afternoon tea with a griffin. Joey Barton¹, the Chancellor of the Royal Unicorn Society of Great Britain, echoes this sentiment in the opening line of his poem Unicorns, which starts: “Unicorns. Well bugger me, aren't they great”.

Except now, we're being told this isn't the case at all. It seems they've been getting good publicity for no good reason, and this is a Bad Thing. The Korean Central News Agency (KCNA)² reported last week that they had discovered a unicorn lair in Pyongyang, from a time when – get this – they had to be banished from the kingdom by King Tongmyong. Banished! The lovely unicorns!

Now either the KCNA are wrong, and the unicorns were never in the kingdom to be kicked out in the first place and didn't live in a lair with the words “Unicorn Lair” scratched into a rock at the entrance to it, or they have obtained yet another scoop of Pullitzonian proportions and confirmed the suspicions of scientists that in fact, unicorns were actually no good all along. Let's go with the latter.

It turns out that far from being mythical, or lovely, they really did exist and were essentially the horrible-bastards-about-town of their day. What started as a healthy working relationship between man and beast quickly soured when it turned out that unicorns were notoriously cantankerous. Sometimes they would go weeks without even speaking, and when they did it would only be to criticise (“I know you want me to help plough this whole field, but I'm telling you there's no chance you're growing any flax on this sandy grit you so laughably call your livelihood”) or dangle the turnip of fake hope (“I could give you the secret to eternal life – but I won't because you've got an ugly soul”. “Ooh look, a rainbow! No, its gone”).

When tethered to wooden railings outside the Korean bars of old (which American pioneers famously recreated in the frontier towns of the Wild West) they would often file through the rope with their horn, before bursting through the saloon-bar doors to announce there was a fire down the street. But there was never ever a fire. They would then trot off down the street whistling irritating yet catchy songs that would stay in people's heads for literally tens of minutes.

Whilst it is sad that the KCNA have exploded the myth of the Lovely Unicorn so effectively and ruthlessly it is still a testiment to their journalistic principles that they have chosen to do so, and the world is a better place for knowing the truth. Perhaps now that picture postcard will be replaced with another, more realistic one; that of a North Korean man chasing a unicorn down the road with a rolled-up newspaper, ready to give it a pasting. Let's hope so.

1. No, not that one.

2. Yes, that one.